Part 1: Reading the Finalists in the 2023 Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story Category (Patreon)

By Doris V. Sutherland

Welcome to the first of a two-part series reviewing the finalists for the 2023 Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story. The present post will cover Monstress Volume 7: Devourer, by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda (Image Comics), Once & Future Volume 4: Monarchies in the U.K. by Kieron Gillen / Dan Mora (BOOM! Studios), and Saga Volume 10, by Brian K. Vaughan, Fiona Staples, Fonografiks (Image Comics).

Monstrous Volume 7: Devourer

Monstress, the saga of love and war in a fantasy world dreamt up by writer Marjorie Liu and artist Sana Takeda, is a fixture at the Hugos’ Graphic Story category. So far, all seven of its trade paperback volumes have been finalists, with the first three winning in their respective years.

For anyone covering the category’s finalists year after year, this raises the question of exactly how to review the latest volume of Monstress. The ongoing series has no easy jumping-on points for new readers, who are instead required to start with the first volume. Those who do so will already be immersed in Liu and Takeda’s world, will already have seen its sumptuous beauty and experienced its chilling horror, and will hardly benefit from a review of the latest volume. Anyone familiar with the series will know exactly what to expect from each new book: plot threads from past volumes will be carried over and given a few new twists ready for the next instalment.

In Monstress Volume 7: Devourer, we find protagonist Maika Halfwolf in a coma following an attack by her enemies in the Dusk Court. Most around her have given up on her survival and are treating her more as a scientific test subject than a medical patient. The exception is Kippa, the little fox-girl who has followed Maika through her exploits. Kippa remains close to Maika – close enough to see into her visions.

In a dream-state, Maika is accompanied by Zinn, the “old god” that possesses her. Zinn shows her visions of the past, including an interplanetary war between the old gods and an unseen enemy – a tantalising hint of Monstress expanding from planetary romance to full-on space opera. Zinn also shows Maika glimpses of her own past, including interactions that are forgotten to her and new to the reader. Marika is often portrayed as cold, stoic and battle-hardened, and so any opportunity to see her younger, softer, innocnet self does much to enhance her character.

There are many characters in the saga, but most are kept from centre stage. Their presence here serves dedicated readers, those who have followed the series closely enough to parse such dialogue as “you saw the Monkey King, yes? The Dawn and Dusk Courts are both here, it appears.” The true focus is on the internal states of a select few. A case in point is Tuya, Maika’s close friend (perhaps more than friend) who shares her psyche with the Baroness, a sort of hereditary Mr. Hyde. A flashback sequence shows Tuya as a child alongside her dying mother, the previous host of the Baroness.

“Don’t call me mother, either,” says the matriarch to the little girl. “You’re my replacement, and I hate you for it. You’re a leech, a bloodsucker. Born only to absorb all the wondrous things I’ve seen and done.” Her mother then dies, only to return as a ghost – the Baroness – to haunt Tuya. The situation may be fantastical, but the psychological subtext is entirely convincing: with only a few pages, Monstress places a member of its secondary cast into a disturbingly plausible narrative of childhood emotional trauma.

The book’s theme of confronting the past extends even to little Kippa, the youngest member of the cast, who is reunited with a long-lost friend. As is often the case in Monstress, it is Kippa’s job to provide a touch of warmth and optimism to a world that is, for all of its beauty, largely cold and desperate.

In terms of artwork, Sana Takeda once again delivers. Fans of the series will by now be accustomed to the combination of cartoon cuteness and ornate Gothic weirdness with which she builds the world of Monstress, and this volume continues along those lines. The hallucinatory aspect of this volume’s plot allows Takeda to push the boat out to some extent, although she never strays far from the comic’s now-familiar depictions of its fantasy world.

Once, again, we have a volume of Monstress that will be hard to judge fairly until the series as a whole is complete. Yet Monstrous Volume 7: Devourer also stands as a reminder of just why the series is worth following to its end.

Once & Future Volume 4: Monarchies in the U.K.

In Once & Future’s third consecutive appearance on the Hugo Awards ballot, the team of writer Kieron Gillen, artist Dan Mora and colourist Tamra Bonvillain return us to a Britain troubled by supernatural beings.

The series began with a straightforward high-concept elevator pitch: what if King Arthur returned from the grave not as the nation’s saviour, but as an undead monster? From here, it assembled the team of rugby-playing academic Duncan, his gun-toting grandmother Bridgette and his fortune-telling girlfriend Rose to send Arthur back where he belonged. At the end of Volume 3, it looked as though everything had been settled – until some unwise words from a Boris Johnson-esque Prime Minister allowed Arthur and his fellow denizens of the Otherworld to claim all of Britain as their own.

Once & Future Volume 4: Monarchies in the U.K. opens in the aftermath of this cliffhanger, the framing of which clearly evokes Johnson’s handling of the pandemic in real life. “It’s not ever getting back to normal!” yells Bridgette at one of her fellow care-home residents. “This is our normal now! The twit in Number 10 told everyone about it and now we’re all stuck knowing it. So the world is like this because we all know the world is like this!” In this strange new situation, Duncan and company have a host of new foes – and, potentially, some new allies.

The series established early on that its undead villain was just one of many King Arthurs that could conceivably have been revived, but this was merely an academic joke: a reference to how Arthurian legend evolved from the early British legends to the later courtly romances of France. This time around, the detail is a major part of the plot, as a civil war is brewing between the established Skeletor-like Arthur and his shiny Gallicised rival.

The two King Arthurs and their respective knights and wizards are not the only legendary figures in town. Once & Future has generally been careful about which tales it incorporates into its narrative. Aside from the presence of Beowulf and his foes in Volume 2, which required the antagonists to steal the Beowulf manuscript as a plot device, it has so far focused specifically upon Camelot. But now, with the whole country submerged into the Otherworld, any figure from British legend is fair game.

Pre-Christian deities, heroes of ballad and fairy tale monsters are all abroad in the country. The story even touches upon Greco-Roman mythology by pitting its protagonists against a male counterpart to Medusa, in reference to the so-called Bath Gorgon. Later comes an inspired twist on one of Shakespeare’s few Britain-based tragedies.

Gillen serves up another platter of clever ideas, though it has to be said that the surrounding plot hardly puts them to full use. The central family drama (human antagonist Mary is the mother of Duncan and daughter of Bridgette) is restated but pushed only inches forwards, evidently being reserved for the fifth and final volume. More significantly, the core idea of human characters taking on the roles of legendary heroes is pushed to the background. In previous instalments, we saw Duncan become Percival and Beowulf in turn, Rose standing in for Gawain, and Mary sliding from Elaine to Nimue; this added an element of puzzle-solving, as the reader could guess which character would take which role. This aspect is largely missing from volume 4: while a single character becomes a famous fairy-tale monster-slayer, the others are content to blast away with shotguns.

But then, anyone eager to see Kieron Gillen deliver a truly cerebral take on the fantasy canon can always read the recently-concluded DIE, the final volume of which was a Hugo finalist last year. Once & Future was always the Conan to DIE’s Lord of the Rings, offering something altogether punchier, pulpier and more visceral, as Gillen sits back and lets artist Dan Mora do the heavy lifting.

And Mora is once again in fine form, sending the rubber-faced protagonists on a trip through a fantasyland where buildings from modern Britain stand up like ruins. This is a vision of British legend in which even heroes are horrors, and Mora succeeds in creating an imposing set of antagonists. The fantasy figures come across as elemental beings: more abstractions than personages, their bodies seemingly formed from wood, water, metal and lightning.

As colourist, meanwhile, Tamra Bonvillain previously had the job of separating the comic’s mundane and fantasy worlds. Now that these have been combined, she is instead given the task of giving each area of the mythical land its own palette. The result is an effective throwback to the psychedelia-influenced fantasy comics of the sixties and seventies.

As with volume 7 of Monstress, Once & Future Volume 4: Monarchies in the U.K. is hard to judge as a stand-alone book, being another instalment in an ongoing series. However, with only one more book left in the story, it gives a clearer idea of the general shape that Once & Future has been taking. The high concept has, perhaps, been stretched a little thin at this point; nevertheless, there is plenty of promise for a strong finale.

Saga Volume 10

Saga, the comic series by artist Fiona Staples and writer Brian K. Vaughan, is another regular at the Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story. It has been absent for a while, however, as the result of a lengthy hiatus between July 2018 and January 2022. Before this year, its most recent spot on the Hugo ballot was in 2019. Saga Volume 10 collects the first six post-hiatus issues, the story picking up three years after the events of the previous instalment.

Saga deals with the ongoing aftershocks from a conflict between two races: the winged, technologically advanced people of Landfall and the horned magic-users from Landfall’s moon. Symbolising hope for eventual reconciliation between the two is Hazel, a little girl born to a horned father and winged mother.

It could be said that Hazel has always been the central character of Saga: she narrates the story from an unspecified point in the future, and much of the plot has been driven by her parents’ attempts to keep her safe and the efforts of various other parties to get their hands on this most symbolically-significant child. However, as she started the story as a baby, her actual development as a character has taken time. Volume 10 is arguably the first book in the series in which Hazel is unambiguously the central member of the cast.

There are still plenty of other intriguing characters in that cast, of course. Hazel is joined by her mother, Alana, who has lost her wings and so is able to keep both her identity and ethnicity a secret. A new addition to the cast is Hazel’s surrogate father-figure, Bombazine, a burly koala man with a robot arm and a shady past. This makeshift nuclear family is rounded off by Alana’s adopted son, Squire, a boy with a computer monitor for a head who communicates in onscreen text and images; Squire is actually the lost prince of a robotic royal family, but this is, like Hazel’s wings, a closely-guarded secret.

Together, the four try to scrape by in a hostile environment. Alana and Bombazine’s main source of income is through drug-smuggling, although Alana is trying to build a legitimate career hawking baby-milk formula in the streets. As she lacks sufficient permits, the world’s bureaucratically-minded military police do not take kindly to her activities.

Cops are not the only hazard: the very first sequence of the book involves Hazel running into a suicide bomber. (Although this particular incident works in Hazel’s favour, as the resultant explosion keeps the police distracted long enough for Hazel to escape with a stolen cassette album). Later on, during a trip into space, the four have a run-in with pirates. When pirates appear in fiction, particularly fantasy fiction, there is one main question to be asked: are they the fun-loving rebels of children's entertainment, or merciless, cut-throats living lives of plunder and slaughter? In the case of Saga's pirates, the answer is a bit of both.

As far as the children are concerned, the pirate ship is a creative wonderland. Four of the crewmembers have formed their own up-and-coming music band, and have not only their own set of instruments but an entire library of bootlegged albums by sundry artists. Hazel is captivated; at this point in the story she has only just begun to discover the pleasure of music, her narration offering some truisms about youthful discovery:

I don’t need to tell you what song I played, because you already know it by heart. It’s the one you first heard in the background of that chain restaurant where you were having lunch with your road-tripping family. Enraptured, you asked your parents what was playing, and they replied, “I have no idea…but it’s terrible.” And in that moment, you began to understand that the universe no longer belonged to the generation who raised you. You could hear something that they couldn’t, something stranger and beautiful and perfect. By the time the final chords faded into nothingness, you were already changed forever.

For the adults, the pirates are considerably less wonderous. The Skipper is not a neutral party in the ongoing war and he demands that Alana prove which side she hails from. “I’m a pirate, you dumb snowflake cunt”, says Skipper before threatening her family if she declines: “I’m gonna haul your kids up here and rape them to death in front of you. Oops. Probably shoulda thrown in a ‘trigger warning,’ huh?” It is left ambiguous as to whether Skipper, characterised as an Internet edgelord, is bluffing here. “I’m a drug dealer!” he later pleads. “I say all sorts of outrageous crap, but only so I’ll never have to do any of it for real! Come on, you trying to tell me you’ve never fronted to get out of a jam before?”

One of Saga’s key strengths is that, avoiding clear-cut good-versus-evil conflicts, it skilfully explores the grey areas. Nobody, aside from the children, is an innocent in this conflict. Alana, as likeable a protagonist as she may be, acknowledges that she has killed men, women and children during her time in the military: if she is capable of redemption, then so surely are the various characters framed as antagonists. Saga gives us room to empathise with its characters even as they carry out atrocities against other characters that we have come to love. The most poignant example of this in volume 10 is how the story handles the death of Marko, Hazel’s father.

Marko was last seen in volume 9 being stabbed through the chest by a bounty hunter called The Will. While Saga’s past record of saving characters from seeming-death cliffhangers may prompt some readers to speculate how permanent this death was, for the purposes of volume 10, Marko is indeed deceased. The story includes a reunion between The Will and his off-and-on partner Gwendolyn, in which The Will brandishes the skull of Marko – when Gwendolyn was at one time Marko’s lover.

He realises the awkwardness of this situation: “Ah. Shit. Sorry. I knew you and this sicko used to be an item, but I didn’t think–”

“I’m not crying because I’m upset, idiot”, replies Gwendolyn. “These are tears of fucking joy.” The sequence concludes with the two of them having sex only feet from Marko’s skull.

This is an utterly twisted relationship, and in the context of this particular volume, it makes The Will and Gwendolyn come across as irredeemable. However, longtime readers will have grown attached to these characters as secondary protagonists who have done good as well as evil. The Will previously rescued a little girl from sex traffickers, for example; this is alluded to when the pair chat about how the girl is currently getting on in boarding school.

This contrast between domesticity and brutality, between fluffiness and horrific oppression, is an essential ingredient to Saga, with characters’ Jekyll-and-Hyde aspects never far from each other. In Volume 10, even the enormous-headed King Robot – a character who had previously been little more than a sight gag and a minor piece of worldbuilding – is given a sympathetic moment when confronted with the remains of his son, another longstanding character killed by The Will in Volume 9.

As always, Fiona Staples’ artwork captures all of the contradictions in Brian K. Vaughn’s writing. The comic depicts an outwardly whimsical universe of talking animals (even the humanoid characters typically having a few animalistic attributes) with an ever-present undercurrent of surrealism and queasiness.

The fact that the space pirates fly around in a ship shaped like a gigantic skull and crossbones seems cute and childlike, until we recall that previous volumes had included spacefaring giants as part of their universe, raising the question of exactly where those bones came from. Elsewhere in the volume, a cliffhanger hinges on a secret agent being presented with photographs of various established characters – one of them an adorable anthropomorphised seal pup – with explicit orders that they should all be killed.

Holding everything together is the sheer strength of Staples’ character art. As fantastical as they and their surroundings may be, we can truly believe in these characters, whose every expression and mannerism pops off the page. When Alana tells Squire to brush his teeth, despite Squire being a robot with a computer monitor for a head, there is simply no reason to question the logic. These are real people whose every joy, pain and regret is palpable.

The latter half of Saga Volume 10 sees significant shake-ups to the status quo. Towards the end, Alana and Hazel’s found family does not have quite the same set of members as it did at the start of the book. A new threat is on their collective tail, and the cliffhanger ending, while less brutal than some seen in the past, is still wrought with heartache. The volume is really the opening to a new stage in the Saga storyline, and it shows that the series is as strong as ever.